People who try to stop smoking, overeating, nail biting, thumb sucking and/or drinking try a myriad of programs and products to try to break their addictions. Many people try programs like Smoke Enders, Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous. Smokers also often try a variety of products including nicotine inhalers, nicotine flavored patches, nicotine flavored gum, artificial cigarettes and/or oral substitutes such as hard candy and gum.
Unfortunately, group programs are often expensive. Nicotine flavored products are often addictive, often causing side effects such as mouth or throat irritation or cough, and are limited in the duration of their usage, and artificial cigarettes so closely emulate the ceremonial hand-to-mouth process that they often fail to make the user stop smoking. Sucking on hard candy can cause weight gain and sucking hard candy and chewing gum can cause tooth decay.
One theory as to why people smoke is that they were weaned too early, that they were not allowed a long enough period to suck, suggesting the continuing need for humans to suck. A straw or an artificial cigarette gives a smoker an object on which to suck but does not activate the same stimulation of chemical responses as the placement of a cigarette or a pacifier in the mouth.
Studies on newborns show that during circumcisions, "stimulation with the pacifier significantly reduced crying" ("The Effects of a Pacifying Stimulus," Gunnar et al., 1984.) According to another study on newborns, "crying and heart rate declined more rapidly in the pacifier condition than in swaddling," (Campos, 1989.) Doctors also found that pacifiers that had been flavored with sucrose were even more effective in calming babies: "Specifically, control infants who underwent a standard circumcision procedure without intervention cried 67% of the time. A water-moistened pacifier reduced crying to 49%. Crying was reduced further by providing infants with a sucrose-flavored pacifier to suck," (Blass, et al, 1991). Sucking on an unflavored pacifier is antinociceptive to infants, and this antinociception is enhanced by sucrose.
Studies on pacification have been restricted to the newborn period and have neglected to address the effectiveness of pacification at older ages. For an adult in our society, sucking on a thumb is a deconditioned activity. Sucking on a cigarette is disdained by the majority, but is allowed. People who smoke, however, develop the habitual need to suck.
There is therefore a need for a smoking cessation device and method that, without the use of addictive drugs, enables a smoker to cease smoking within a reasonable time period. There is a further need for a device for adults that assists them in stopping oral habits such as obsessive eating, nail biting and thumb sucking.